BigJKO

SimCity: The City Simulator

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Server issues and global trading inconsistencies aside, I really really like this game. I accept that the Sim world is different than the real world and that the percentages for taxes and strange AI are internally consistent, but aren't necessarily related to anything I experience in real life. As long as the simulation makes sense within itself, I'm happy. There have been a few things here and there that have broken that, but nothing so severe that I've shut the game off. In fact, I probably should have shut it off a bit more, I put 20 or so hours into the game over the weekend. :) I also like the limited city size, as it forces you to make some hard choices instead of expanding until you get bored in old games. Better still is the option to start a new city to help fund your old one, and the intercity dynamics it causes.

 

*shrug* I thought I was going to get really ticked, but I'm happy, if they'd get the damn servers working 100%.

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Friend of mine brought up a good point.

 

Why didn't they make this game free to play? EA's been pretty gung-ho about that direction, I'm fairly certain? This seems like a perfect opportunity to experiment, and a perfect avenue to test the microtransactions-only waters.

 

Plus, I think people may have been more forgiving of server issues, AND they could've more easily done invites in waves.Ppeople who buy expect to be able to play right away, but with a more fluid launch schedule, it's not as big of a deal. Or... well, something! to better see how the servers handle all their shit. I dunno. Not sure it's necessarily the best idea, but now I'm a bit curious why they didn't.

 

(Not THAT curiou$.)

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I'm pretty sure a lot of people at EA wanted to make SimCity free to play, but they probably decided the internet would explode too much if that had been announced. I wouldn't be surprised if it was supposed to be free to play at one point, though. Maybe Maxis' old school cred managed to hold off the suits.

 

However, I'm counting the days until they announce the first thing we have to pay for that people will rage about since they think it should've been in the game, like bigger cities or better citizen AI. EA have been slightly humbled by launchgate, but that last a couple of months, tops. EA expects to make tons of money off in-sim purchases, I bet.

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I'm willing to buy things for this game, depending on what they are. The little mini-quest type buildings like Maxis Man and Dr. Vu don't really interest me, but if they put in a whole different specialty, I might consider buying that.

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I'm pretty sure a lot of people at EA wanted to make SimCity free to play, but they probably decided the internet would explode too much if that had been announced. I wouldn't be surprised if it was supposed to be free to play at one point, though. Maybe Maxis' old school cred managed to hold off the suits.

 

However, I'm counting the days until they announce the first thing we have to pay for that people will rage about since they think it should've been in the game, like bigger cities or better citizen AI. EA have been slightly humbled by launchgate, but that last a couple of months, tops. EA expects to make tons of money off in-sim purchases, I bet.

Oh, yeah, I think you're probably right on both counts.

 

I think that's not a bad thing, though. I believe/hope that this will be The SimCity Game for a long time, with lots of updates and new content as time goes on. Hopefully some free, but probably not.

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Oh, for sure, it's not necessarily a bad thing that they'll be selling stuff. By the way, have they actually said they'll be doing that at all? There's no mention of it in the game, so far, right? Like a menu thing? Maybe it'll be handled through Origin, rather than in-game. Anyway, as long as they're not charging for stuff that ought to be a patch, they should go to town, and if they end up selling additional systems or something else that makes the simulation even deeper, I'm in.

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That all sounds true to me - I would say that it is my belief that this kind of fidelity is less satisfying than the kind of fidelity you get with something like Sim City 4 - namely, that your cities end up looking like actual cities rather than tiny cities. The best of both worlds is having everything done in discrete chunks in a normal sized city, and some day when we all have supercomputers then we can have that, but until then, it's fuzzy to me why I'd like discrete simulations if those just end up giving me super weird, counterintuitive results. The fun I get from city building games isn't micromanaging things on the level of X discrete units - it's either from building a city with character (Sim City 4) or from getting to know each individual person (Tropico). But in Tropico, I can get to know individual people because they all have jobs, and houses, and I can fire them from the job, and so on. Sim City doesn't get that nitty gritty, but it also doesn't let me get Sim City 4 levels of scale, so...No, I definitely didn't mean to imply that it's wrong for a game to present any worldview. Certainly games can have opinions and advance them. But what opinion does Sim City advance? That American-style cities are desirable? No, it advances the opinion that only American-style cities are viable. It's literally impossible to build a European style 20% tax public transportation city. If you try to move things in that direction, your city falls apart. The message here is that if you try to do something sensible with respect to transportation, you will crash and burn. That's a silly message to send because clearly Europe makes it work. Sim City 4 is an example of something that sends the right message: multiple transportation solutions work, as long as you implement them correctly. (It probably still fucks the taxation up but whatever.)I guess I think the responsibility falls on Maxis because they don't seem to be very clear about how they're just letting you build American cities. The Gamasutra article I linked is a great example. That dude lives in the UK and used Sim City to model his UK city to figure out UK traffic patterns. Neither he nor anyone in the comments at any point said anything like "well, Sim City is a very American-centric game and you can't really use it to draw conclusions about anything other than preternaturally tiny American cities." I think the Anno 1404 comparison isn't really on point - if Anno had had a "Chinese" set of buildings and stuff, I think it would be a totally fair criticism of the game to say that its game mechanics didn't at all support any sensible sort of Chinese history lesson.I think I have a twofold disagreement. The first is that I don't really see Sim City as being just American, but I'll grant for the sake of the argument that it is. Besides that, I think I would argue that the game is misrepresenting the possibilities for American cities because a car-centric design is hardly necessary in America. Just look at New York, for instance, and more importantly look at cities like Washington DC, Chicago, and so on that incorporate mass transit like trains or subways into their planning. If we were building those cities from the ground up today, I don't think anyone would say that a car-centric design is the only option and certainly not everyone would say it's the best option. But as far as I can tell, the newest Sim City, aside from some bus stuff and some park and ride stuff, assumes that all cities must be car-centric. That's patently wrong, in America and in the rest of the world, especially if you are building a new city, because people have tried and succeeded in making cities that aren't just car-centric.

But the car issue is just a subset of the larger point - I think games that purport to represent reality in a neutral way have a responsibility to model that reality in a way that at least approximates the actual reality. Sim City, I think, very definitely claims to be at least broadly "right" about how stuff works. But it rules things out of the possibility space that are, in the real world, possible. And in doing so, it is complicit with the efforts of others to rule those options out, and when we rule actual options out at the "reality" stage rather than the "choiceworthy" stage, we're doing it wrong. It's incorrect at best and manipulative and deceptive at worst.But Sim City makes no effort to communicate the fact that its "creative" aspect inheres not just in the obvious creative choices they've made, but in the very reality they're modeling! You have to ask yourself why certain choices make a city thrive in the context of the game and why certain choices make it founder. If those choices make it thrive or founder because they're bad choices in the context of the simulation, I think Sim City wants to claim that, at least vaguely, these are bad choices in life, too. To the extent putting trash next to your residential district or putting polluting industries on the pristine coastline or leaving fire stations out of your city master plan result in issues, I take it Sim City is claiming that this happens not because some designer arbitrarily decided, one day, to make this the case, but because the designer was trying to capture the sort of thing that happens in real life.

So when Sim City makes a failure out of a city built to be walkable or public-transitable or heavily taxed or whatever, or even worse, doesn't even let you try, surely this sends the message not that some designer arbitrarily ruled these viable options out for no reason other than unexplainable capriciousness, but rather than the designer ruled them out because they don't work, or they're not even close to optimal. And that is my complaint. The central conceit of Sim City is that you are building a city. Your options are, to some abstract degree, the options that people have when they make cities. And when your options don't fit the actual options, or lead to outcomes divorced entirely from the actual outcome, it seems to me the game is being disingenuous with respect to its central conceit, not that the game is engaged in a perfectly understandable act of fictionalization.

You had a conversation about Reciever a few episodes ago on the podcast. You noted how much you liked that it actually made solid the sorts of interactions you have to go through to use a gun - you thought it was gross how many games are about nothing but shooting people but at the same time how those games treat guns completely different from how a gun actually works. As far as I can tell, Sim City is trying to put itself into the Receiver category of games about cities, not the other category (and in fact I can't think of any city games that would go into the "let's just have fun, fuck realism" category of city builders - Age of Empires actually comes pretty close, I think, because I remember having lots of fun building cool looking ancient cities in that without worrying a fig about how it worked in the simulation, because there was no simulation). Sim City is to cities as Reciever is to guns: it goes through a stupendous amount of trouble to model as much as it can to a great degree of fidelity.

But now imagine that Receiver made it impossible to operate a gun in some way. Maybe it won't let you pull the slide back or whatever. One response would be to say "well, designers have to make choices, and in the fictional universe of Receiver, I guess you can't pull the slide of a gun back." That sounds odd, doesn't it? Why can't you pull the slide back? There's no in-universe justification, and in fact Receiver doesn't have any in-universe justification of any of its gun porn. It just treats guns like actual guns and assumes that you will understand why it does this: it's modeling actual guns! So its failure to model one sort of gun action would be inexplicable.

Sim City is like that. Why can't I build a walkable/public transportation city? Why can I buy British DLC or whatever even though my attempts to recreate London are going to crumble and fail? Surely you can't say "well, designers have to make choices, and in the fictional universe of Sim City, I guess cities can't be walkable." That's just crazy! Sim City goes to no effort to explain that it takes place in a magic land where cities can only work like people in 1950's America (incorrectly) thought they had to work.

You make a lot of good points but since I'm at work I'm just going to be a jerk and cherry-pick one of them to respond to in the interest of time: the Receiver one.

I don't think Receiver is a good comparison. Receiver is about one specific kind of interaction and absolutely nothing else--all of the other systems in the game are incredibly rote and undeveloped; they only exist to support this one specific conceit, which is that you use a gun realistically. I don't think there is an example of a recreational city simulator that could be compared to that--by the nature of what a city is, there are so many interdependent systems that in order to even come close to modeling enough of them to create a workable city simulator in a format that's fun for people to play, you have to abdicate a lot of fidelity and depth SOMEWHERE. (Maybe in the wrong places, though.)

Also, for what it's worth, I don't think you're disagreeing with me when you say you think SimCity represents American cities (or potential American cities) poorly. I tried to indicate I think that's a completely valid line of criticism.

Edit: One thing about Anno. Even within individual Anno games, they DO have aesthetically separate city sets (ie, Occidental vs. Oriental) but they are the simulational equivalent of palette swaps. They operate fundamentally identically and most buildings have no difference beyond artwork and name. Also, regardless of what year the Anno game is--1404 vs 2070, for example--the actual economic and municipal models work identically.

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I really recommend this traffic explanation: 

 

 

It showcases how different types of roads meeting creates different types of intersections.  You want to layout your city such that the biggest roads carrying the most traffic aren't a bunch of 4 way stops, but always have the right of way.  It's also helpful to avoid having building entrances or exits on these main arteries.

 

Some more useful road layout tips here: 

 

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Maybe my brain has been warped by the way DC is planned with straight gridlines, because it never even occurred to me to design roundabouts.

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I'm surprised too.  You don't see any tooltips or popups explaining it at all.  It's incredibly easy to drop 4 way stops everywhere and be completely confused as to how you are ever supposed to handle traffic.

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You make a lot of good points but since I'm at work I'm just going to be a jerk and cherry-pick one of them to respond to in the interest of time: the Receiver one.

I don't think Receiver is a good comparison. Receiver is about one specific kind of interaction and absolutely nothing else--all of the other systems in the game are incredibly rote and undeveloped; they only exist to support this one specific conceit, which is that you use a gun realistically. I don't think there is an example of a recreational city simulator that could be compared to that--by the nature of what a city is, there are so many interdependent systems that in order to even come close to modeling enough of them to create a workable city simulator in a format that's fun for people to play, you have to abdicate a lot of fidelity and depth SOMEWHERE. (Maybe in the wrong places, though.)

Yes, they do have to cut the fidelity in some places, and I'm not annoyed with games that reduce the complexity of a simulation and cut corners in order to make a workable game out of an approximation of reality rather than out of reality itself. I don't think this is the case for Sim City, though. I don't think "the ability to make cities in a way other than the way 1950's America thought cities to be" is something they've done to cut corners and reduce work - I haven't played the game, but as far as I can tell, there are massively complex things going on with all sorts of interlocking systems, from city halls to casinos to recycling centers to interconnected regions that connect cities and so on and so forth. Yes, there's a reduction compared to what was in Sim City 4, but I don't see why the reduction had to be done in a way that leaves the player the ability to build the most intricate, interconnected road systems the series has ever seen (seriously - the effort they put into making stuff like curved roads work must have been massive, and the stupendous accessibility of these curved roads was one of the first things you guys talked about on the podcast) and into making the roads in general work in complex ways (see the video posted this page). So why put all that effort into a game that models car-centric transportation solutions for cities? Why not put the effort into a more reasonable vision of what cities were, are, and could be, and maybe only have 4 kinds of streets instead of 6 or whatever to cut down on the complexity of the car simulation?

Let's assume I'm wrong, though, and that public transportation and other sensible options were cut because they were too much work, not at the expense of adding tools designed primarily to make sure you can recreate suburbs. I do have a problem when these reductions are done in non-transparent ways that suggest that they mirror reality itself, when this of course isn't the case - cities can be walkable and based around public transportation and have higher taxes and so on and so forth. Sim City doesn't model this possibility, but it also doesn't strike me as a game that is honest about this fact. That's the work I think the Receiver analogy is doing - I have no problem with Receiver leaving all sorts of guns out of the game, but it's a central conceit of Receiver that for all the guns that are in the game, you can use them like actual guns, and it's clear that if you can't do something with a gun in Receiver it's because the gun isn't in Receiver. There's no assumption built into the game's systems that the only things you can do with guns are the things you can do with Receiver's guns.

Whereas there does seem to be an assumption built into Sim City's systems that the only things you can do with transportation in a city is what you can do with Sim City's roads. The fundamental determiner of zone density or productiveness or something seems to be road bandwidth, from what little I've heard - the fundamental assumption underpinning how cities work in this game is that cars need to get where cars need to get, and if you can't facilitate that, your city is fucked. That's not how cities work, though! Cars only need to get places built to be car destinations. If you want to build a city centered around public transportation, where not many people drive, that's totally possible. But Sim City rules that out from the get-go without ever telling anyone. I don't think the Sim City box in the store says "build your dream city, as long as you dream about 1950's America!" From what I can tell, Sim City bills itself as a city simulator, not as a regressive, stuck in the past city simulator.

Edit: One thing about Anno. Even within individual Anno games, they DO have aesthetically separate city sets (ie, Occidental vs. Oriental) but they are the simulational equivalent of palette swaps. They operate fundamentally identically and most buildings have no difference beyond artwork and name. Also, regardless of what year the Anno game is--1404 vs 2070, for example--the actual economic and municipal models work identically.

I've never played any of the Anno games so I shouldn't really be talking, but I think the issue is sort of different because nobody today is colonizing islands or whatever, whereas people are doing urban planning, and having lived in Seattle for many years and having time and again seen people argue with all their heart against public transit because they don't really see a future for Seattle as a city where you can get around without driving, I find myself very frustrated to see this game reify what I take to be pretty damaging, regressive attitudes in the way the game models the real world. Sim City seems designed from the ground up to model cities as one specific kind of city, and that's why I think it's fundamentally misguided or dishonest. It bills itself as Sim City but it's Sim Suburb City or Sim Fucked Up American Car City or something.

I do have to say that I might be coming around to your position to the extent that Sim City does bill itself as Sim Regressive City or whatever - you said that you understood completely well that Sim City wanted to model a specific kind of city, namely the American "get a car or get bent" city that so many of us are stuck with, for better or for worse. So if you're right about that, then I'm largely fine with Sim City, although I'm also disappointed that they chose to make a game that lets you build only the shitty cities. It's like making a farming game where the only way to run your farm is to have a slave plantation. It's like, sure, if you want to build that game, then go ahead, but it seems weird and provincial to just model the worst kind of farm in your farm simulator. The stuff that got me thinking about this (the molleindustria tweet, which was retweeted by Harvey Smith, and the articles it led to) certainly seem to head in the other direction - people were expecting legit Sim City and got Sim 50's Suburb instead. This article talks about the author's disappointment at seeing the improvements in the franchise from Sim City up through Sim City 4 rolled back. Others don't seem to realize that they've gotten Sim 50's Suburb yet, like that Gamasutra article I linked where the guy was trying to model traffic patterns from his British town.

I think my point can be summed up by a comment made on this article by Reverend Joe Zarro, whoever he may be:

For those saying "It's just a game" I actually think this is really important. SimCity encourages people to use their imaginations to design an ideal city, but it also guides that imagination -- if people are guided toward little Phoenixes, then they'll think that's how cities should be, but when they build a dense, vibrant, prosperous and walkable city, they'll realize how much better it is to have good transit in their cities!

And then it turns out you don't even have an option to do anything other than build little Phoenixes.

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Fun factoid. Since the release of Sim City (2013), roughly five times as many of my friends are actively playing Sim City 4 as are playing 2013

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Fun factoid. Since the release of Sim City (2013), roughly five times as many of my friends are actively playing Sim City 4 as are playing 2013

That's basically how it is with my friends and CS 1.6 since CS:GO was released.

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I keep thinking that SimCity 4 sucked, but then I remember that I only convinced myself of that because the disk of it that I bought came scratched and I wanted to feel better about my missed opportunity. What are people's thoughts on SimCity 4 versus this? I know Tom Chick's started stumping for SimCity Societies on his site.

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That's basically how it is with my friends and CS 1.6 since CS:GO was released.

 

This is sort of how I feel, I kind of just want to play Sim City 4 again.

 

I appreciate a lot of what's been done. I do. I like the interlocking systems and whatnot, I like the simulation. It just feels too simplistic though. On Llama speed I just filled half a "city" within an hour. I could have kept playing, but I saw the end practically before it felt like I'd begun. It feels like a painting game, but you're only ever allowed the tiniest of canvases and the smallest of paintbrushes.

 

Looking at the "school coverage" my sims seems to refuse to walk 3 blocks to get to a school. "It's down the road? Too far for me!" The entire game feels like it's been compacted for this tiny scale they want to present you, which edges out the notion of it representing a city at all. As if Maxis was more interested in it's own tiny scale experiments than presenting the idea of, to borrow a phrase, actually simulating a city.

 

And as it's missing part of the conceit, or rather that the conceit is you're supposed to believe in these little people that refuse to walk more than a block away to get to anything at all, it's also missing part of the appeal. When I played Sim City 2000-4, a large part of the appeal was that it felt like you actually had control of a city, you were it's ruler and master, you could build whatever it came to mind. "Sim City' seems more interested in all the little workings of it's simulation rather than presenting you the idea that you are actually simulating a city, or that you're presented with a city at all. It's more like they thought it was an interesting veneer to paste over their interesting simulation, rather than an end goal in and of itself.

 

Oh, and Tom Chick, whoever he, is probably one of only two people on the entire planet that enjoyed Sim City Society's, and for very good reason. What an awful not game that was, like Farmville but for people with even less imagination or intelligence.

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I keep thinking that SimCity 4 sucked, but then I remember that I only convinced myself of that because the disk of it that I bought came scratched and I wanted to feel better about my missed opportunity. What are people's thoughts on SimCity 4 versus this? I know Tom Chick's started stumping for SimCity Societies on his site.

I haven't played the new one, but SC4 is my favorite. SC2k was stupendous, SC3k was alright but nothing special, and SC4 was a return to form. Never tried Societies - it was considered a failure when it came out but I've heard some people say it was an under-appreciated gem.

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So I hope this game is good or becomes good at some point, because I'm getting it and my brother is also getting it as a birthday present. Some of the stuff that's been revealed about the simulation really bothers me, but I'm hoping the team gets the chance to make it better (I'm not talking about the political stuff).

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I still like it, but if you're the type that has to make the most efficient city possible, you'll spend a lot of time trying to predict the quirks and shortcuts in the simulation rather than having fun.

 

Edit: Not that optimising and working the AI can't be fun, just that it's frustrating in this particular game because of the inconsistencies.

 

Edit2: Those road videos are awesome.

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It is not a very well designed game in many ways and it is incredibly buggy and poorly documented, but it is also a total joy to play on a moment-to-moment basis. At least that's my experience. 

 

Also you can make underpasses and off-ramps if you have hilly terrain, which can really help with traffic. I wish they'd open up the terraforming tools so you could add overpasses/tunnels where ever you want.

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That does seem like a feature they could add fairly easily since it already exists when the roads happen to be at different elevations.

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Yes, they do have to cut the fidelity in some places, and I'm not annoyed with games that reduce the complexity of a simulation and cut corners in order to make a workable game out of an approximation of reality rather than out of reality itself. I don't think this is the case for Sim City, though. I don't think "the ability to make cities in a way other than the way 1950's America thought cities to be" is something they've done to cut corners and reduce work - I haven't played the game, but as far as I can tell, there are massively complex things going on with all sorts of interlocking systems, from city halls to casinos to recycling centers to interconnected regions that connect cities and so on and so forth. Yes, there's a reduction compared to what was in Sim City 4, but I don't see why the reduction had to be done in a way that leaves the player the ability to build the most intricate, interconnected road systems the series has ever seen (seriously - the effort they put into making stuff like curved roads work must have been massive, and the stupendous accessibility of these curved roads was one of the first things you guys talked about on the podcast) and into making the roads in general work in complex ways (see the video posted this page). So why put all that effort into a game that models car-centric transportation solutions for cities? Why not put the effort into a more reasonable vision of what cities were, are, and could be, and maybe only have 4 kinds of streets instead of 6 or whatever to cut down on the complexity of the car simulation?

Let's assume I'm wrong, though, and that public transportation and other sensible options were cut because they were too much work, not at the expense of adding tools designed primarily to make sure you can recreate suburbs. I do have a problem when these reductions are done in non-transparent ways that suggest that they mirror reality itself, when this of course isn't the case - cities can be walkable and based around public transportation and have higher taxes and so on and so forth. Sim City doesn't model this possibility, but it also doesn't strike me as a game that is honest about this fact. That's the work I think the Receiver analogy is doing - I have no problem with Receiver leaving all sorts of guns out of the game, but it's a central conceit of Receiver that for all the guns that are in the game, you can use them like actual guns, and it's clear that if you can't do something with a gun in Receiver it's because the gun isn't in Receiver. There's no assumption built into the game's systems that the only things you can do with guns are the things you can do with Receiver's guns.

Whereas there does seem to be an assumption built into Sim City's systems that the only things you can do with transportation in a city is what you can do with Sim City's roads. The fundamental determiner of zone density or productiveness or something seems to be road bandwidth, from what little I've heard - the fundamental assumption underpinning how cities work in this game is that cars need to get where cars need to get, and if you can't facilitate that, your city is fucked. That's not how cities work, though! Cars only need to get places built to be car destinations. If you want to build a city centered around public transportation, where not many people drive, that's totally possible. But Sim City rules that out from the get-go without ever telling anyone. I don't think the Sim City box in the store says "build your dream city, as long as you dream about 1950's America!" From what I can tell, Sim City bills itself as a city simulator, not as a regressive, stuck in the past city simulator.I've never played any of the Anno games so I shouldn't really be talking, but I think the issue is sort of different because nobody today is colonizing islands or whatever, whereas people are doing urban planning, and having lived in Seattle for many years and having time and again seen people argue with all their heart against public transit because they don't really see a future for Seattle as a city where you can get around without driving, I find myself very frustrated to see this game reify what I take to be pretty damaging, regressive attitudes in the way the game models the real world. Sim City seems designed from the ground up to model cities as one specific kind of city, and that's why I think it's fundamentally misguided or dishonest. It bills itself as Sim City but it's Sim Suburb City or Sim Fucked Up American Car City or something.

I do have to say that I might be coming around to your position to the extent that Sim City does bill itself as Sim Regressive City or whatever - you said that you understood completely well that Sim City wanted to model a specific kind of city, namely the American "get a car or get bent" city that so many of us are stuck with, for better or for worse. So if you're right about that, then I'm largely fine with Sim City, although I'm also disappointed that they chose to make a game that lets you build only the shitty cities. It's like making a farming game where the only way to run your farm is to have a slave plantation. It's like, sure, if you want to build that game, then go ahead, but it seems weird and provincial to just model the worst kind of farm in your farm simulator. The stuff that got me thinking about this (the molleindustria tweet, which was retweeted by Harvey Smith, and the articles it led to) certainly seem to head in the other direction - people were expecting legit Sim City and got Sim 50's Suburb instead. This article talks about the author's disappointment at seeing the improvements in the franchise from Sim City up through Sim City 4 rolled back. Others don't seem to realize that they've gotten Sim 50's Suburb yet, like that Gamasutra article I linked where the guy was trying to model traffic patterns from his British town.

I think my point can be summed up by a comment made on this article by Reverend Joe Zarro, whoever he may be:And then it turns out you don't even have an option to do anything other than build little Phoenixes.

It is my opinion that SimCity has a lot more to say about simulation game design than about actual real-world cities.

Presumably quite early on in development, they made certain decisions about 1:1 simulation and reducing municipal service micromanagement by having those services become part of the actual skeleton of your city inherently--and that skeleton is based on roads, because for the most part in the relatively modern developed world, even in very progressive cities, cities are structured around roads, and have been before cars existed. That's not to say that's the only way ever corner of a city can be built, just that with the fairly ambitious simulational goal that Maxis set out to achieve, I can clearly see that they needed some kind of fairly comprehensible and consistent metaphor for city structure that needs to be universal. For example, you can't just zone a a bunch of residential without roads out in the middle of undeveloped land. Why not? For one thing, in this game, areas don't just become abstractly populated--sims have to actually move in in a very direct way, because of very fundamental goals this game has about the simulation. So how do they get there? They drive there. Could they just walk there? Sure, theoretically, but then you're suddenly dealing with a bunch of multiplicatively complex AI systems like pathfinding without a clear road system. So then maybe the game say you can build a road OR a walkway, and either one is equally find for extending the area of your city. And so and and so on--there are a million additional dependencies that you can continue to tack on.

Now, there's nothing that says they had to choose this simulational model in the first place. But making the first new SimCity in a decade, it's entirely understandable to me that they would want to bite off a totally different model and follow it through to its logical conclusion. Maybe it's not for everyone. But the way the cities in this game work to me seem to be a very sensible result of the way they chose to build the simualation.

I DO think it would be entirely possible, now that this game system is proven out and will have some amount of time in the wild (once it starts working properly anyway), for Maxis to start working on an expansion that drastically expands out from this system, using the current model as a base and saying, for example, "How can we logically extend this out to allow for zoning areas that are heavily based around public transit?" or whatever. But those are going to be massive design questions to answer and I think it's almost certainly for the best that Maxis took the approach they did with the initial release of this game, given the early design goals they apparently set for themselves.

For whatever reason, I just don't think Maxis is as beholden to replicating reality as completely as possible as you do. I think Maxis chose some design goals first and foremost, and did their best to be true to those; and I find those design goals interesting enough that I find the resulting game interesting and compelling, at least in theory--there are still some complaints I have even within that context. But look at something like "Civilization." Actual civilization still exists now in reality, and in the game Civilization you can reach the year 2013, and yet that series rarely takes hits for not modeling civilization as accurately as might be theoretically possible. Ultimately, Civilization uses the passage of history as its starting point, but is largely accountable to a particular game design ethic more than anything else; I feel SimCity is the same way. Some entries in the SimCity series have different goals in that respect; this one has one, SimCity 4 has another.

I still think being accountable to an interesting design conceit is more interesting and admirable than being accountable to essentially nothing other than bombast and spectacle, which is what many large-budget games are. If it fails in its accountability to its own goals, I think that's a more interesting line of criticism than it failing to be accountable to the real-world models you would have liked the designers to chase but which they didn't.

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